My Bullet Journal

I kept hearing about this bullet journal thing, so I did a bit of digging, and it sounded pretty cool. I must admit that I don’t quite follow the guidelines as mine’s just for my fiction stuff.

For those who aren’t sure what on Earth a bullet journal is, it’s a journal where you put everything. Your to do lists, your daily logs, your happy memories, anything and everything that you might want to record, goes in the bullet journal.

So what does it actually consist of? How do you do it?

Whatever you want!

That’s the wonderful thing about this system, you do what works for you. Personally, I love colour and I like to keep my fiction separate from my other stuff. So my bullet journal is my fiction journal.

You start with an index that you update as you add in new pages. Those new pages can be whatever works for you. They can be daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly to do lists. They can be your to be read list, your favourite quotes, movie’s you’re dying to watch, research ideas for future books, character names your adore, actors that you’d love to see in adaptations of your books. The list is endless!

How you approach is page is also down to you. There’s a basic system there, you put together a key to make your own short hand. I have a blue dot for stuff I’ve written, pink circle for stuff I’m reading, a green tick for stuff I’ve done, and so on. The whole point is to help you be more organised, de-stressed, and have fun!

Personally I doodle in mine and throw a lot of colour at it, because that’s what makes me happy. If you prefer something much neater and simpler, fantastic, that works too! There’s no pressure here, and that’s wonderful.

I’ve been doing mine for maybe 3 weeks now, and I love it. I’ve taken some pictures to show you what I’ve put into mine – I should add that I added a page for the Infernal Hunt book release check list just after I took these pictures.

This is my index. This is relatively low on the whole colour thing, and I kinda like it that way.

As you can see it has my basic key and lets me know what’s on which page so I don’t need to flip around searching for stuff.

Then we have my daily logs. That’s where I make notes on fiction related stuff for the day. For me, that means if I’m editing (my fiction) then what I’m editing and how it’s going. It’s also my word count for that day, what I’m reading, and any distractions that got in the way. My logs have gradually become more colourful and doodle-filled as I’ve got into this process. I find it really therapeutic to doodle in there.

The first few days were very simple and low on colour.

I started to relax a bit more.

This is the page I started today!

These are a couple of the collections that I have.

The bars get filled in as I write chunks on those books. Infernal Alliances is being written out of order, so you can see the sections I’ve written so far.

There are some beautiful bullet journals out there, and so many ideas of what to use it for! For those of you who make note of daily word counts, then they can go in the bullet journal. You can use the stickers to track them, and then see patterns of what distractions caused the most problems and so on and so forth.

If you can read the index you saw that I have a collection of words that made me smile, you could try that. They can be things people have said to you, or famous quotes, whatever works for you! There are so many ideas to make this project incredibly practical and fun.

Now for some more links to give you some ideas of how you can make this very simple idea work for you!